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Introduction

The poem, one of Hugo’s most celebrated lyrics, appears in the collection entitled Les rayons et les ombres (1840) as No xxxiv. This is an extended structure of thirty-eight strophes. Of these Fauré selected verses 1 and 8 for the opening Grave, and then 9, 10, 31 and 32 for the Allegro non troppo. Victor Hugo himself is ‘Olympio’ (subsequently used as a nickname by his contemporaries). The background of the poem is the poet’s love for Juliette Drouet. In 1834 and 1835 the couple dallied in the woods that lay between their respective holiday lodgings in the valley of the Bièvre river, not far from Paris. (Hugo was a guest at the Château des Roches with his wife and young family.) After this secret idyll which occasioned some of his greatest love poetry, Hugo revisited the region on his own in 1837 when, as ‘Olympio’, he castigates nature for being impervious to the former presence of the lovers. Nevertheless he realizes that a landscape, however evocative, can never retain the imprint of human memories. Tristesse d’Olympio is also a lament for the gradual waning of the ardent passion Hugo had known with Juliette (although she remained devoted to her beloved ‘Toto’ until the end of her life). The composer has cleverly cut the poem, but Fauré’s song fails to encompass Hugo’s philosophical scope; it is no surprise the composer withheld it from publication. The music, however, aspires to something of the poet’s grandeur: the modal feel of the opening slow section is typical of Fauré in elegiac mood, a spaciousness that suits the structure (AABCCB) of the two six-line strophes. The solemnity of this music is prophetic of such songs as Seule!, L’absent, and Au cimetière. This section ends with the words ‘Alors il s’écria:’. After this colon Hugo places the poem’s remaining thirty strophes – all quatrains – in inverted commas as Olympio speaks in the first person. This change of voice ushers in a new, faster tempo – restless accompanying quavers supporting a terse and desperate vocal line where the ABAB rhymes tumble out across the stave. This moto perpetuo, where the piano-writing carries the voice ineluctably forward, is prophetic of Toujours, but it also has an intensity that brings to mind J’ai presque peur, en vérité from La bonne chanson. Both of these songs can be heard later on this disc.

Recordings

'Recording and presentation are the stuff of dreams. Hyperion has done Fauré proud' (Gramophone)'The songs certainly show Fauré to possess a far wider expressive range than an acquaintance with just a handful of his best-known examples would sugg ...» More

The fields were not black, the skies were not bleak; No, daylight blazed in infinite blueness Above the earth, The air was filled with incense, the meadows with greenness, When he set eyes on those places again where through So many wounds his heart poured forth!

Alas! recalling his sweet adventure, Gazing, without entering, over the fences Like an outcast, He wandered all day long. Towards nightfall, His heart felt as heavy as a tomb, Then he cried out:

‘O grief! I, whose soul is troubled, wished To know if the urn still contained the liquor, And to see what this happy vale had made Of all I had left there of my heart!

‘How quickly everything can change! O nature, how you forget with your unfurrowed brow! And how you and your metamorphoses sever The mysterious threads whereby our hearts are bound!